Panel of Experts the Wellbeing Project
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Local Wellbeing Index Development: Panel of Experts The Wellbeing Project Panel of Experts has been assembled by RAND Corporation, in partnership with the New Economics Foundation (nef), to draw upon the deep knowledge base of leading researchers from various disciplines to inform and advise development of the framework for the first Local Wellbeing Index. Anita Chandra, DrPH, is the lead representative from RAND’s Behavioral and Policy Sciences Department, working in collaboration with Saamah Abdallah, Senior Researcher with nef’s Centre for Well-Being. About the Panel Saamah Abdallah – New Economics Foundation Saamah is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Well-being, where he has worked since its foundation in 2006. Saamah leads the Centre’s analytical and measurement work, including work on indicator and indicator sets such as the Happy Planet Index, National Accounts of Well-being, and the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. Other recent projects include a report based on analysis of the European Quality of Life Survey, advising Eurostat on measures of quality of life and well-being, and BRAINPOoL - an EU funded project looking at the opportunities and barriers to Beyond GDP indicators being used in policy making. Saamah is a member of Eurostat’s Quality of Life Expert Group, and the UK Office for National Statistics’ Technical Advisory Group on Wellbeing. Saamah is particularly interested in how the science of well-being can inform research into pro-environmental behaviour and value change, and a more sustainable economy. Saamah has an academic background in the natural sciences, having graduated from the University of Cambridge in Experimental Psychology, and having worked for two years as a research assistant, in Cambridge and at the University of Barcelona. He has also completed an MSc. in Democracy and Democratisation at University College London, where his dissertation explored views of deliberative democracy. Saamah also has a strong background in non-formal education, having worked in this field in the UK, Poland and Spain. Outside of work, Saamah has a passion for travel (for example, he spent 2011 living and working in Latin America), theatre, and cycling. James Anderson - Bloomberg Philanthropies James Anderson leads the government innovation portfolio and develops strategic initiatives for Bloomberg Philanthropies. In this capacity he oversees initiatives including the Mayors Challenge, an innovation competition for cities (which Santa Monica won for its well-being project), and the Innovation Delivery Team program, a multi- city effort to refine models that mayors can use to develop and deliver innovation. He also led the foundation’s successful efforts to launch the first social impact bond in the United States, in partnership with the City of New York and Goldman Sachs. Before joining Bloomberg Philanthropies, James served as communications director to New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. During that time, he was the chief architect of NYC Service, the City’s high impact citizen service strategy, and Cities of Service, a bipartisan coalition that now includes over 160 mayors representing more than 55 million Americans. Previously, he served as senior advisor to the commissioner of the City’s homeless services agency, and as communications director for the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national advocacy organization. He lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Sarah Burd-Sharps - Measure of America Sarah Burd-Sharps is Co-Director of Measure of America, a project of the nonpartisan Social Science Research Council that provides easy-to-use yet methodologically sound tools for understanding well-being and opportunity in America. Sarah is co-author of two volumes of The Measure of America (Columbia University Press, 2008 and NYU Press, 2010) as well as state and county-level well-being reports for California, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Marin and Sonoma Counties. Prior to this position, Sarah worked for the United Nations for over two decades, with a focus on democratic governance, economic empowerment, and gender equity. Before she left the UN in 2007 to found Measure of America, she was Deputy Director of the UN’s Human Development Report Office, where she worked on three global Human Development Reports (Oxford University Press) and led the UN’s work on national human development reports on every continent. Sarah contributes regularly to media outlets, with articles published in the New York Times, The Nation, Huffington Post, and more, and research cited by Forbes, The Atlantic, Washington Post, NPR, Slate, Freakonomics blog, and many more. She received a Masters degree in International Affairs from Columbia University. Anita Chandra – RAND Corporation Anita Chandra, DrPH, is a senior policy researcher and director of the Behavioral and Policy Sciences Department at the RAND Corporation. Her background is in public health, child and adolescent development, and community- based participatory research and evaluation. She currently leads or co-leads studies on community well-being; deployment and military families; community resilience and long-term disaster recovery; and child health and development. Throughout her career, Anita has engaged government and nongovernmental partners to consider cross-sector solutions for improving child and community well-being and to build systems and evaluation capacity. This work has taken many forms including engaging with the Department of Health and Human Services and local government agencies on building systems for emergency preparedness and resilience both in the U.S. and globally; partnering with private sector organizations to build the science base around child systems; and collaborating with city governments and foundations to measure well-being, sustainability, and health transformation. Specifically, in the area of wellbeing, she has particular expertise in measurement of health and social connections, youth assets and development, and lifespan trajectories. This expertise is currently being applied with partners in Washington, DC as part of a healthy communities collaborative and interactive dashboard and with partners in Memphis to track child wellbeing particularly in the early years of life. Anita has also partnered with community organizations to conduct broad-scale health needs assessments, to examine the integration of health and human service systems, and to determine how to address the needs of historically vulnerable populations in health and social services. These projects have occurred in partnership with local health systems, foundations, and other community organizations. Elizabeth Cox - New Economics Foundation Elizabeth Cox is an economist who has leads on nef’s UK and international local economic development work, and has responsibility for developing international partnerships. Her work includes developing community-based action research and enterprise support approaches. She has particular research interests in exploring what low carbon, high well-being local economic development looks like in practice, and the design of measurement and reporting frameworks. Current projects include: supporting the London Borough of Haringey to deliver their 40% carbon reduction commitment by 2020; piloting a climate change adaptation approach with 12 UK communities; developing measurement frameworks for social impact investment; and working with civil society partners in South Africa and India to establish national hubs to widen debate and action on developing the new economy in these countries. This latter project includes developing criteria for the new economy, mapping existing new economic policies and practice, and developing innovation labs to support enterprises. Prior to joining nef in 2003 Elizabeth worked as an economist in South America for four years, and as a Research Fellow in the University of Aberdeen. Local Wellbeing Index Development: Panel of Experts Lew Daly – Demos Lew Daly is Director of Policy and Research, helping to plan and manage research and policy development across the organization. He also currently leads Demos’s Beyond GDP project, a multi-year campaign to advance alternative indicators of well-being and sustainability in federal and state-level governance in the United States. He is the author (with Stephen Posner) of Beyond GDP: New Measures for a New Economy. A companion report, What is Our Public GDP? Measuring and Valuing Government in the Twenty-First Century Economy, is forthcoming in 2014. Lew works internationally as a member of Global Well-Being Lab and as an advisor to the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation in South Africa. Lew was previously a fellow of the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy, where he worked closely with then- president Bill Moyers on special projects, and he was a research fellow of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland from 2002-2005. In the mid-1990s, he did pastoral work in a federal prison as well as community organizing on labor issues. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and advanced degrees from Brown University, the University at Buffalo, and Union Theological Seminary. With his wife Pam Rehm and their children Nate and Cora, he lives in the West Harlem neighborhood of upper Manhattan. Nancy Etcoff - Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital Dr. Nancy Etcoff is a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School and Harvard University's Mind-Brain-Behavior Initiative conducting scientific investigations in the psychology and neuroscience